The present invention generally relates to computer systems, and more particularly, to a method and system for providing efficient same document lookup with different keywords from a single view.
Lotus Notes is one of the most popular hierarchical database management systems (HDBMS) in use today. It is a full-featured, robust groupware application developed by Lotus, which is now part of IBM. Lotus Notes is a client-server platform that enables users to access, share and manage information over a network. Lotus Notes was one of the first applications to support a plurality of distributed databases of documents that could be accessed by users across a network. Lotus Notes enables users to create document databases, post them to a network and share them with their coworkers. Its sophisticated replication enables users to work with local copies of documents and have their modifications propagated throughout the entire Lotus Notes network. Lotus Notes facilitates users to access network databases containing collections of related documents, which can include forms, reports, lists, articles and other information.
A Lotus Notes client is composed of a workspace of pages, wherein each workspace page holds databases of documents as well as other information. Workspace pages are similar to file folders in that each page can be optionally named, and it contains an area in which a user can place databases and other related information.
As aforementioned, in Lotus Notes, related documents are stored in databases. For example, a user may create an address book database that contains the names, addresses and telephones of clients. The documents in a database may contain text, graphics, pictures and other types of data. Another often-used database is a mailbox database, which contains a collection of documents a user has sent or received. A user may access databases, which were created locally by the user or by a network administrator and which are available on a network server.
In database management systems, a view is a particular way of looking at a database. A single database can support numerous views. Typically, a view arranges the records of the database in some order and makes only certain fields of the database visible. The different views do not affect the physical organization of the underlying database. A Lotus Notes database displays the contents of the database in a view. A view is composed of categories of various documents. The contents of the view depend upon the database that a user is currently viewing.
In a database, a category describes documents that are contained within a particular database. In a view, categories can be expanded to reveal documents or collapsed to hide the associated documents and only leave the category visible. Clicking a graphical user interface arrow beside the category either displays or hides documents of a category. A category is a logical container that contains documents, but unlike documents it cannot be opened. Categories are main topics into which a user organizes documents. Categories appear in a database view with associated documents listed below them.
A user may create a variety of views, with each view depicting the contents of a database in a different way. For example, a user may want to create a lookup view that categorizes a plurality of documents of a particular database, that is, a view that displays categories in which plurality of documents appear in a database. Any particular document may appear in one or more categories in a view. Lotus Notes allows for a document to be categorized more than once in a view, that is, where the document appears in one or more categories in a view. Lotus Notes performs the categorization by creating a multi-value field in the particular document, which contains the categories in which the document should appear. If the category in which a document should appear changes, the document must be updated to contain this new information. In addition, if a document is referenced in a plurality of views, a categorization for each view would have to be stored in the document. The maintenance of the categories within each document requires disk storage to store the categories of one or more views in which a particular document must appear. The maintenance of the plurality of views in a Lotus Notes databases retards the performance of the database and increases database size, since each view needs to store its own index.
Therefore, what is needed, especially given today""s dynamic computing environments, is a method to perform document lookup from a single view without the necessity of storing categorization information within each document.
There are many advantages to the lookup of the present invention over the standard Lotus Notes lookup. In the present invention lookup view, database documents and their children do not need to maintain categories in which they are to appear. Moreover, the present invention takes less storage than the native Lotus Notes lookup because categories do not need to be maintained. Furthermore, the present invention does not have to propagate to the children the category information of the parent documents unless the children are used in that view.
There are known schemes for indexing documents, but the present invention uses a different approach to the prior art indexing schemes. Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to facilitate the categorization of documents based on formulas instead of lists in cascading views.
The prior art approach to solving the present problem of addressing a document with different keywords is to have several views associated with the document. Therefore, another object of the present invention is to eliminate the need for the multiple views and allow the same document to be located with different keywords from one database view.
It is another object of the present invention is to facilitate a plurality of Lotus Notes programming environments in varied industries to utilize the present lookup utility.
It is another object of the present invention is to enable a user to maintain the same document in many categories within a single view without storing categorization data within the document.
Yet another object of the present invention to facilitate the dynamic creation of categories.